Peter Asher Everywhere Man: Doc on Pop Culture Maven is Part Memoir, Part Tribute, All Charming
By Karen Gordon
Rating B+
If you were old enough to tune a transistor radio in the Beatlemania/British Invasion years of the mid-60s and onward, then you might know who Peter Asher is without having to do an internet search.
Asher was half of a pop duo called Peter and Gordon, who launched their career in 1964 with a song called “World Without Love,” written by Asher’s pal Paul McCartney, that became an international hit.
Peter and Gordon had an impressive run of hit songs before they broke up around 1968, and went their separate ways, with Asher moving from pop artist and gallery owner in London’s swinging 60s to becoming a major record producer and artist manager in the U.S., where he still lives and still makes records.
Peter Asher: Everywhere Man is a charming documentary: part memoir, part tribute and part look at a key period of popular culture and music history.
The film shines a light on a quiet and key figure in one of the most vibrant eras in pop music both in the UK and the U.S., and whose look and style in the groovy era appears to have influenced the appearance of a certain fictional cultural character. More on that later.
The documentary is based on a cabaret show that Asher put together, where he told stories and performed a few songs, sometimes singing along with videos his old partner, the late Gordon Waller, who appeared on a screen behind him.
Interestingly, the film’s directors, Daniel Geller and Dayne Goldfine, didn’t really know who Asher was before they went to see the cabaret at the invitation of their friend Linda Ronstadt, Asher’s long-time client as her manager. They were so taken by Asher’s storytelling and his stage personality — a mix of reserve and mischief, as well as his singular sense of style — that they decided to make the play into a doc.
Their doc uses the bones of the cabaret performance to tell the story of Asher’s fascinating life: the ginger-haired son of a brilliant doctor and musician mother, who not only performed professionally, but was the late producer George Martin’s oboe teacher.
Asher had two sisters, also redheads, notable enough that they became child actors. One of them, Jane Asher, continued to act as an adult, becoming a well-known personality in the UK who became even more famous when Paul McCartney fell in love with her and, at the invitation of her parents, moved into the Asher home.
Peter, in the meantime, had fallen in love with pop music and teamed up with a school chum Waller. They got a record deal, and ended up with a string of hit records, sometimes competing on the charts with the Beatles, even as some of the songs were written by McCartney.
The film looks at Asher’s life in the era beyond music. Asher loved books and art and with two partners, opened a bookstore and a modern art gallery in London, both named Indica. Those both became hot spots for the art and celebrity crowd and ignited several major romances. It’s where Marianne Faithfull met Mick Jagger, and John Lennon met Yoko Ono.
Asher’s relationship with the Beatles led him to his next career movie. When the Beatles launched Apple Records, Asher became the company’s A&R director, whose job was to find and record new talent that he sometimes produced. That’s where he met and signed the young American singer-songwriter, James Taylor.
When Apple started to fall apart, he and Taylor moved to the States, which is where he signed and produced Ronstadt, a talented young singer who was struggling to find a label and a producer who really understood her talent and musical direction.
Asher, the onetime quintessential British pop artist, began to help shape a strain of 70s American music with Taylor and Ronstadt becoming two of the dominant artists of the decade and beyond. He had a knack for finding musicians to help shape and support his artist’s music in the recording process and then sending them out together on the road, something that wasn’t standard in the era.
Asher himself is a low-key, interesting, intelligent guide, and his stories are given context by many of the people who have known him through the years: Eric Idle, the late Gordon Waller, Ronstadt, Taylor, Carol King, Steve Martin, Danny Kotchmar, and Waddy Wachtel among others.
The documentary really focuses in on Asher and the way his career developed but ends up also being the story of a few eras in popular music.
Which brings me back to Peter Asher in the swinging 60s. It’s impossible not to note the similarity between the way he looks and Mike Myers’ Austin Powers character, particularly in the film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. So, did Myers model Powers’ look on Asher? Sit through the credits for that debate.
Peter Asher: Everywhere Man. Written and directed by Don Geller and Dayna Goldfine. With Peter Asher, Gordon Waller, Paul McCartney, Steve Martin, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, and Pattie Boyd. In theatres July 3.